My Soul To Lose
by MidnightGardevoir
Summary: AU. May is not your ordinary girl. She can't stop screaming. And when she screams, something bad is about to happen. Along with her gorgeous friend Dawn, the popular hot Brendan Hayden as well as the mysterious reaper Drew, a secret bigger than what any of them would know is about to unfold...


My Soul to Lose

Chapter 1

Nothing belongs to me... Characters might be OOC

May's POV

"Thanks for the ride, Misty!" Dawn slammed the back door of her sister's car then opened it again to free the end of her filmsy pink mini-dress as her sister leaned

out the open driver's side window.

"Be ready to go at eight, or I'm leaving you here."

Dawn gave a mock salute, giving Misty a 'whatever' look. She then turned toward the mall entrance without waiting for the car to pull away from the curb. We would be

nowhere in a 100m radius near the parking lot at eight o'clock. Finding a ride home would be no problem at fact, it was so easy that Dawn could pull it off

within a she had to do was to shake her cheerleader hip before giving a baby-doll look, and guys all over the world would make even the most unreasonable

wish of hers a command of theirs.

But sometimes a ride by her 'fans' was more fun, because she could flirt with the driver. See how much he could take before his concentration wavered and he had to

force his attention back onto the road. She'd never actually caused an accident, but she went a little further every time, ever eager to push the limits of...

Well, of anything.

I went along for the ride because it was a delicious rush of power and freedom—living vicariously through Dawn was usually more exciting than living my own drab and

dull life for real. Besides, who says no to a free ride?

"Okay, May, here's the plan." Dawn stepped up to the glass doors, and they whooshed open. The artificial cool inside was a mercy on my damp skin and overheated

cheeks; Misty's car wasn't air-conditioned, and July in the Hoenn climax was still hot enough to make the devil sweat.

"So long as it leads to Joshua's public humiliation, I'm in."

"It will." She stopped in front of a mirror built into the wall of the main walkway and her reflection grinned at me, sapphire-blue eyes similair to mine, sparkling.

"And that's the least he deserves. You really should have let me key his car."

And I'd been totally tempted to. But I was less than a year from getting my license and couldn't shake the certainty that if we crashed someone's fresh paint job—even

if that someone was my rat of an ex-boyfriend— karma would come back to bite me on already bad enough times.

"So, what are you going to do? Push him into the snack table? Trip him on the way into the gym? Pull a prank on him in front of the class to humiliate him? Unbutton

his pants while you're dancing, then scream for help?" I wasn't too worried about homecoming-dance karma. But Joshua should have been...

Dawn turned from the mirror, her blue brows high in surprise. "I was just gonna stand him up, then make out with his best friend on the dance floor, but that last one

has real potential. Maybe doing both helps." She grinned again, then tugged me around the first corner to the huge main corridor of the mall, where the center of the

floor opened to reveal the first level below. "But first we're gonna make sure you look so good that he spends every minute of that stupid dance wishing he asked you

to the homecoming-dance instead."

Normally I'm not much of a shopper. Thin and small chested looks just as good in jeans and skinny tees as it does in anything more complicated, and I must have been

dressing to my advantage subconsciously, because finding a new date had only taken two days.

But that didn't make Joshua any less of a trubish. Not less than an hour after he'd dumped me, he'd asked Dawn to homecoming. She'd accepted with a plan for revenge already half-plotted.

So I'd come to the mall the weekend before the dance armed with my aunt's credit card and my best friend's good taste, prepared to dump a metaphorical shaker of saltover my slime-filled rattata of an ex-boyfriend.

"We should start with..." Dawn stopped and gripped the brass rail, looking down at the food court on the lower level. "Yum. Wanna split a soft pretzel first?"

I knew from her tone that food wasn't what had caught her eye. Eye candy had done the job.

A level below us, two guys in green Pokemon Technical High baseball caps were shoving two tables next to a third, where four girls from our school sat in front of an untouched pile of junk food. The guy on the left was a junior named Brendan Hayden, whose pick of the week—Veronica something-or-other—was already seated. Showing up at homecoming with Brendan would have been all the revenge I could ask for against Joshua. But that wasn't gonna happen. I wasn't even a blip on Brendan Hayden's social radar. Much less worth his attention. Next to Veronica sat my cousin, Leaf; I would have recognized the back of her head anywhere. After all, that was the part of her I saw most.

"How did Leaf get here?" Emma asked.

"One of the other dancing whoevers picked her up this morning." She'd been ignoring me consistently—mercifully—since dance-team tryouts a month earlier, when she'd

become the only freshman member of the varsity dance team. "Aunt Val's picking her up in about an hour."

"I think that's Paul Shinji across from her. Come on!" Dawn's eyes glittered beneath the huge skylight overhead. "I wanna drive his new car."

"Dawn..." But I could only run after her, dodging shoppers hauling bags and small children. I caught up with Emma on the escalator and rode down one step above her.

"Hey look." I nodded toward the group at the food court, where one of the dancers had just switched sides of the table to whisper something into Paul's ear. "His girlfriend is gonna be pissed when she sees you."

Dawn shrugged and stepped off the escalator. "She'll get over it. Or not."

But the moment my foot hit the ground, a cold, dark sense of dread gripped me, and I knew I couldn't go any closer to the food court. Not unless I wanted to cause a scene. I was seconds from losing control over the scream building deep inside me, and once it broke free, I wouldn't be able to make it stop unless I could get away. Better to leave before that happened.

"Dawn..." I croaked. One hand went to my throat; it felt like I was being strangled from the inside. Dawn didn't hear me; she was already strutting toward the cluster of tables.

"Dawn..." I said again, forcing that single syllable out firmly, ahead of the pressure building in my throat, and that time she heard me.

Dawn turned and took one look at my face, and her forehead wrinkled in familiar concern. She glanced longingly toward the food court, then rushed to my side. "Having a panic attack?" she whispered. I could only nod, fighting the urge to close my eyes. Sometimes it was worse then, when I saw only darkness. It felt like the world was closing in on me. Like things I couldn't see were creeping toward me.

Or maybe I watch too many scary movies.

"Okay, let's go." Dawn linked her arm through mine, half holding me up, half dragging me away from the food court, the escalator and whatever had triggered this particular...episode.

"A bad one?" she asked, once we'd put a good two hundred feet behind us.

"It's getting better." I sat on the edge of the huge fountain in the center of the mall. The jets of water shot all the way up to the second floor at certain points during its routine, and little droplets pelted us, but there was nowhere else to sit. The benches were all full.

"Maybe you should talk to somebody about these panic attacks." Dawn plopped down beside me with one leg tucked beneath her, trailing her fingers through the rippling water.

"It's weird how they seem to be locked on specific places. My aunt used to get panic attacks, but walking away didn't help her. The panic went with her." Dawn shrugged and grinned. "And she got really sweaty. You don't look sweaty."

"Well, at least there's a bright side." I forced a laugh in spite of the dark, almost claustrophobic fear still lurking on the edges of my mind, ready to take over at the first opportunity. It had happened before, but never anywhere so heavily populated as the mall. I shuddered, thinking how close I'd come to humiliating both me and Dawn in front of hundreds of people. Including half a dozen classmates. If I freaked out in front of them, the news would be all over school by the tardy bell on Monday morning.

"Still feel like cooking up a little revenge?" Emma grinned.

"Yeah. I just need one more minute."

Dawn nodded and dug through her purse for a penny. She couldn't resist feeding the fountain, despite my certainty that no wish you had to pay for could possibly come true. While she stared at the coin on her palm, eyes squinted in concentration, I steeled myself and turned to face the food court, my jaws clenched tight. Just in case.

The panic was still there—indistinct but threatening, like the remains of a nightmare. But I couldn't pinpoint the source.

Usually I could put a face on the dark dread looming inside me, but this time the crowd made that impossible. A group wearing our rival school's colors had taken the table next to Leaf and her friends, and both sides were deeply engaged in a French-fry war. Several families stood in line, some parents pushing strollers, one pushing a small wheelchair. Some kind of moms-'n'-tots group had descended upon the frozen-yogurt place, and couples of all ages shuffled their way through the cattle shoots in front of each restaurant's counter.

It could have been anybody. All I really knew was that I couldn't go back there until the source of my panic had gone. The safest thing to do was to get as far away as possible.

Dawn's penny plunked into the water behind me, and I stood. "Okay, let's try Sears first."

"Sears?" Dawn's frown puckered both her forehead and her glossed lips. "My grandmother shops there."

As did my style-conscious aunt, but Sears was as far from the source of my panic as we could get and still be in the mall. "Let's just look, okay?" I glanced at the food court again, then back at Dawn, and her frown faded as understanding sank in. She wouldn't make me say it. She was too good a friend to make me voice my worst fears, or my certainty that, at that moment, they could all be found at the food court. "They might have something..." I finished weakly.

And with any luck, by the time we'd scoured the juniors' department, whoever had triggered my panic attack would be gone.

Maybe I should have tossed a penny in the fountain too.

"Yeah. They might have something." Emma smiled, and we made our way quickly down the central corridor. The tension in my neck eased with each step, and I only

realized I'd been grinding my teeth when my jaw suddenly relaxed. By the time we stepped into the cloud of perfumed air near the Sears makeup counter, the panic had

completely receded into memory.

It was over. I'd narrowly escaped complete terror and utter humiliation.

A little giddy from relief, Dawn and I glanced through the dresses, then spent the next hour trying on goofy, pastel-colored pants and flamboyant hats to pass the time, while I kept my mental fingers crossed that, when we left, the coast would be clear. Metaphorically speaking.

"How you feelin'?" Dawn tilted the brim of a neon green hat and smoothed the long blue hair trailing beneath it. She grinned and made a face at herself in the mirror, but her eyes were serious. If I wasn't ready to go, she would hide out in the Sears granny section with me for as long as it took. Em didn't truly understand about my panic attacks—no one did. But she'd never pushed me to explain, never tried to ditch me when things got weird, and never once looked at me like I was a freak.

"I think I'm good," I said, when I realized that no traces remained of the shadowed horror I'd glimpsed earlier. "Let's go."

The boutique Em wanted to hit first was upstairs, so we left our hats and sherbet-colored pants in the dressing room and laughed our way through Sears until we found the in-store escalator.

"I'm gonna wait until everyone's there—till the dance floor's totally packed—then I'll press up really close to him." Clutching the rubber handrail, Dawn twisted to face me from the tread above, a mischievous grin lighting up her eyes. "Then when he's really happy to see me, I'll yank his zipper, shove him back, and start screaming. They'll probably throw him out of the dance. Hell, maybe they'll expel him from school."

"Or call the cops." I frowned as we stepped off the scrolling stairs and into the bed-and-bath department. "They wouldn't do that, would they?"

She shrugged. "Depends on who's chaperoning. If it's Lt. Surge, Toby's screwed. He'll pin his balls to the ground before he even has a chance to zip up."

My frown deepened as I ran my hand across the end of a display bed piled high with fancy pillows. I was all for humiliating Joshua, and I was certainly up for wounding his pride. But as satisfying as the whole thing sounded, getting him arrested hardly seemed like a fitting consequence for dumping me the week before homecoming. "Maybe we should rethink that last part..."

"It was your idea." Dawn pouted.

"I know, but..." I froze, and my hand flew to my neck as a familiar ache began at the base of my throat.

No. Noooo!

I stumbled back against the bed, suddenly swallowed whole by a morbid certainty so vicious I could hardly draw my next breath. Terror washed over me, a bitter wave of anguish. Of grief I couldn't understand, or even place."May? Are you okay?" Dawn stepped in front of me, half blocking me from the other shoppers' sight, and lowered her voice dramatically. "It's happening again?"

I could only nod. My throat felt tight. Hot. Something heavy coiled in my stomach and slithered toward my throat. My skin crawled with the movement. Any moment, that swelling screech would demand freedom and I would fight to contain it.

One of us was going to lose.

Dawn's grip tightened on her purse and I recognized the helpless fear in her eyes. They probably reflected my own. "Should we go?"

I shook my head and forced out two last whispered words. "Too late..."

My throat burned. My eyes watered. My head swam with pain, with echoes of the shriek now trying to claw its way out of me. If I didn't let it, it would tear me apart.

Nononono...! It can't be. I don't see it!

But there it was—across the aisle, surrounded by rainbow-hued mountains of bath towels. A deep shadow, like a cocoon of gloom. Who is it? But there were too many people. I couldn't see who swam in that darkness, who wore shadows like a second skin.

I didn't want to see.

I closed my eyes, and shapeless, boundless terror closed in on me from all sides. Suffocating me. That bitter grief was too hard to fight in the dark, so I forced my eyes open again, but that did little good. The panic was too strong this time. Darkness was too close. A few steps to the left, and I could touch it. Could slide my hand into that nest of shadows.

"May?"

I shook my head because if I opened my mouth—or even unclenched my jaws—the scream would rip its way free. I couldn't force myself to meet Dawn's eyes. I couldn't tear my gaze from the shadows coalescing around...someone.

Then the crowd shifted. Parted. And I saw.

No.

At first, my mind refused to translate the images sent from my eyes. Refused to let me understand. But that blissful ignorance was much too brief.

It was a kid. The one in the wheelchair, from the food court. His thin arms lay in his lap, his feet all but swallowed by a pair of bright blue sneakers. Dull brown eyes peered from a pale, swollen face. His head was bare. Bald. Shiny.

It was too much.

The shriek exploded from my gut and ripped my mouth open on its way out. It felt like someone was pulling barbed wire from my throat, then shoving it through my ears, straight into my head.

Everyone around me froze. Then hands flew to cover unprotected ears. Bodies whirled to face me. Dawn stumbled back, shocked. Scared. She'd never heard it—I'd always avoided catastrophe with her help.

"May?" Her lips moved, but I couldn't hear her. I couldn't hear anything over my own screaming.

I shook my head. I wanted to tell her to go—that she couldn't help me. But I couldn't even think anymore. I could only shriek, tears pouring down my face, my jaws open so wide they hurt. But I couldn't close them. Couldn't make it stop. Couldn't even dial back the volume.

People moved all around me now. Mothers let go of their ears to herd their kids away, foreheads furrowed with the headache we all shared. Like a spear through the brain.

Go...I thought, silently begging the bald child's mother to push him away. But she stood frozen, both horrified and somehow transfixed by my audio onslaught.

Motion to my right drew my attention. Two men in khaki uniforms ran toward me, one yelling into a two-way radio, his free hand over his other ear. I only knew he was yelling because his face was flushed with the effort.

The men pulled Dawn out of the way, and she let them. They tried to talk to me, but I couldn't hear them. Couldn't make out more than a few words from their silent lips.

"...stop..."

"...hurt?"

"... help..."

Terror and grief swirled inside me like a black storm, drowning out everything else. Every thought. Every possibility. Every hope.

And still I screamed.

One of the mall cops reached for me, and I stumbled backward. I tripped on the base of the display bed and went down on my butt. My jaw snapped shut—a brief mercy.

But my head still rang with the echo of my shriek, and I couldn't hear him. And an instant later, the scream burst free again.

Surprised, the cop stepped back, speaking into his walkie again. He was desperate. Terrified.

So was I.

Dawn knelt next to me, hands over her ears. Her purse lay forgotten on the ground. "May!" she shouted, but made no sound I could hear. She reached for her phone. And as she dialed, color suddenly drained from the world, like The Wizard of Oz in reverse. Dawn went gray. The cops went gray. The shoppers went gray. And suddenly everyone stood in a swirling, twisting colorless fog.

I sat in the fog.

Still screaming, I waved my hands near the ground, trying to feel. Real fog was cold and damp, but this was...insubstantial. I couldn't feel it at all. Couldn't stir it. But I could see it. I could see things in it.

On my left, something twisted. Writhed. Something too thick and vertical to be serpentine. It twisted somehow through a shelf of towels, without ever touching the shoppers pressed against them, as far from me as they could get without leaving the department.

Apparently I was enough of a freak show to justify the pain of listening to me.

On my right, something scuttled through the mist on the ground, where it was thickest. It scurried toward me, and I leaped to my feet and dragged Dawn away. The cops jumped back, startled all over again.

Dawn pulled free of my grip, her eyes wide in terror. And that's when I shut down. I couldn't take anymore, but I couldn't make it stop. I couldn't stop the shrieking, or the pain, or the stares, or the fog, or the eerie movement. And worst of all, I couldn't stop the certainty that that child—that poor little boy in the wheelchair—was going to die. Soon.

Dimly I realized I'd closed my eyes. Tried to block it all out.

I reached out blindly, desperate to get out of the fog I couldn't feel. Could no longer see. My hands brushed something soft and high. Something I no longer had the

word for. I scrambled up on it, crawling over mounds of material.

I curled into a ball, clutching something plush to my chest with one hand. Running my fingers over it again and again. Clinging to the only physical reality that still existed for me.

Hurt. I hurt. My neck hurt.

My fingers were wet. Sticky.

Something grabbed my arm. Held me down.

I thrashed. I screamed. I hurt.

Sharp pain bit into my leg, then fire exploded beneath my skin. I blinked, and a familiar face came into focus over me, gray in the fog. Aunt Val. Emma stood behind

my aunt, face streaked with mascara-stained tears. Aunt Val said something I couldn't hear. And suddenly my eyes were heavy.

New panic flooded me. I couldn't move. Couldn't make my eyes open. And still my vocal chords strained. The world was closing in on me, dark and narrow, with no sound but the harsh wail that still poured from my abused throat.

A new darkness. Pure. No more gray.

And still I screamed...

Author's notes: Not really much of a change from the originals but it was still and effort, I hope! ^_^ Do stay tunned for the next chapter!


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